10e20 Blog

Last week blogger Ryan Tomayko wrote a post about Internet Explorer testing with Parrallels (a software program for Intel Macs). Someone then submitted this story to Digg. At some point on December 26th - the story hit the Digg homepage and was subsequently buried. Ryan went to the page on Digg and got a strange feeling from the comments:

The comments over there are pretty much unanimously in favor of having me drug out into the street and shot.

Ryan echoes the feelings of many people recently when he says that he’s not writing a “story” for Digg Corporation and has very little interest in changing his writing style to serve the Digg “community”.

So what did Ryan decide to do about it? He setup a 403 Forbidden response to serve to someone when the server detects someone coming from digg. So if you surfed in from Digg you wouldn’t get the page you were looking for but instead would get a message like this:

403 Go Away! The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it because you’re coming from digg.com and the proprieter of this system is frankly terrified by you people. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.

Interesting approach Ryan. Perhaps instead of blocking them why not redirect that traffic to another website (I am sure that there are plenty of people who would be willing to take it)? I also wouldn’t be terrified by Digg users at all. They are normal everyday people and the majority are good people too. It’s just that somehow along the line snarkiness and “hating” become more acceptable for commenting then common sense and probably saying what you truly think.

When I covered the domains banned by Digg, Shawn Hogan the owner of Digital Point was thankful that his domain was banned by Digg:

Personally, I think the ban of my domain (digitalpoint.com) is a good thing. Keeps people from posting idiotic threads just so they can submit it to Digg. I never asked to get it unbanned, and in truth if Digg did unban it on it’s own, I would ask them to reban it.

But Ryan’s case is one of the first instances of someone blocking Digg due to not liking the culture and community. People are usually clamoring to get on Digg due to the traffic, exposure and ultimately links that it will bring to your site. Has this been so ingrained in Digg user’s minds that they think everything is written with that specific purpose in mind (as Ryan seems to think)? Has the feeling of power (being able to bury a story) and relative anonymity (that allows people to say things they wouldn’t say face to face) created this culture? Is it a case of a few rotten apples spoiling the bunch or is this the majority of users? I would think it’s the former because how else could you explain the outpouring of help/prayers/sympathy with the James Kim tragedy?

But in a case like Ryan’s when his blog is simply a hodge podge of information thrown together by Ryan Tomayko in the spirit of a weblog - with what seems to be no commercial motivation - why would he want to be ridiculed and have his intelligence constantly called into question?

Not the internet’s fault this guy is an idiot.

On the other side - his blog is in the public domain. It’s open to feedback - good or bad - just probably not used to (bad) feedback on such a large scale before. This leads to a new question. Should Digg implement some type of opt-out policy? For example - something that would be the equivalent adding Digg to your Robots.txt file as ‘disallowed’ then someone would not be able to submit a story from your site. As Digg continues to grow these issues will continue to arise and how they deal with them will ultimately lead to their success or downfall.